Help Fund Schools Across Minnesota

Let me strongly encourage you, especially if you live in Minnesota, to write a letter like this to your representatives. I wrote to my state senator, my state representative, and the governor. You can cut and paste from my letter below, replacing the parts in ALL CAPS with your own personal experience.

Here is where you can find contact information for your state representative and state senator: https://www.gis.lcc.mn.gov/iMaps/districts/

Here is how to contact the governor: https://mn.gov/governor/contact/

Here is the template for your letter to them:

Hello ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE,

I want to strongly encourage you to fully fund the gap between what schools have been mandated to do and what they have been given the funding to do. This gap is sometimes called “cross subsidy costs”. Schools have been mandated to, for example, provide special education to children with disabilities from birth to age 21, but they often have to use General Fund dollars to cover the costs of that.

INCLUDE HERE THE WAYS INADEQUATELY FUNDED SCHOOLS IN YOUR DISTRICT HAVE IMPACTED YOU. FOR EXAMPLE, I WROTE ABOUT HOW BUSING HAS BEEN SLASHED.

Funding the cross subsidy costs would put money back into the General Fund and allow YOUR DISTRICT HERE and other districts across Minnesota to GET BETTER IN SOME WAY. LIKE I SAID, FOR ME IT WAS ABOUT BUSING.

Please use some of our 17.6 billion dollar surplus to cover the unfunded mandate of the cross subsidy costs. I hope that with Democrats in control of the legislature and the governorship that it will be a top priority and it will get done. I don’t know why it seems to have died last year but please get it done soon. Please let me know the status of this issue as it evolves.

Thank you for all your work. I have always voted for you and always will. I look forward to hearing from you.

YOUR NAME AND EMAIL GO HERE

p.s. I used this article in researching this issue:
https://www.house.mn.gov/SessionDaily/Story/17074

Tell 'em Memphis Evans sent ya.

Newly Available Evan Johnson Material

Put this on streaming in a separate window and then come back here and read about it:

https://ellida.bandcamp.com/album/walk-in-the-sun

This is a project that I am just thrilled about. In 2003, my musician friend Evan Johnson made a sprawling 5 disc anthology of the music he had created before he started playing his singer/songwriter material with Karl and I in the mid '90s. I found the discs fascinating, personal, and alternately driving and poignant, like the best instrumental music is.

The CDs he gave me were ripped rather haphazardly from stereo mixes on Digital Audio Tapes and the sound quality was poor. There were dozens of pieces but no titles. Banding of the tracks was left to an automatic machine that was bad at it. I made this kinda insane, definitely compulsive website chronicling these third generation recordings:

http://memphisevans.com/EvanJohnson/EJA/index.html

The DATs the stereo mixes had been on were lost or reused. The pieces had originally been recorded on a high speed, analog cassette four track, but Evan’s Tascam Porta Two HS had stopped working years before so there was no way to remix or re-transfer these wonderful pieces to the digital realm.

But I left an eBay search notification in place for the phrase "High Speed Tascam Porta Two".

In July 2019 a functional machine showed up on eBay and I won it and started the work of transferring and remixing the first 23 four track tapes. (More were found during a recent move.) I think they sound amazing now and it’s been thrilling to recover these wonderful pieces and hear them as they were originally recorded. They are very clean and bright but still have the warmth of analog tape.

This is the second of what I hope will be many albums from this treasure trove of Evan's compositions. (A long lost live album of the singer/songwriter material came out last year.)

Enjoy!